More pro for the DEC Professional 380 (featuring PRO/VENIX)

The ascii art partway through the article is extremely endearing:

    % cat /thankyou

      THANK YOU FOR RESCUING ME

         ******
        *      *
       *  *  *  *
       *        *
       *  *  *  *
       *  *  *  *
       *   **   *
        *      *
         ******

When I worked at Middlesex Polytechnic in North London, UK in the mid 1980s DEC actually gifted us with three of these things (we were a big DEC customer - Dec10 and several VAXen). We really had no idea what to do with them as they came with no useful software - as I remember only the OS (RTX of some sort, I think) and a rather good Lunar Lander game. They were also terribly unreliable - the internal bus was very flaky. We accidentally fixed this by carrying them in the back of a van between Poly sites - the vibration re-seated things, and later worked out that lifting them a few inches and then dropping them did the same.

I also had a DEC Rainbow, which made a very nice VT200 terminal, but was otherwise nearly as useless. I did actually write some software for it to support the Polys student application clearing service, which made use of an 8mb hard drive that came packed in a crate about as large as a dishwasher.

I was so happy when the first IBM XT arrived.

PS Good article!

> We simply can't seem to beat the Pro's firmware to come up first before the Pro concludes no hard disk is present.

>charge the capacitors (very fast) and start bringing up the BBG while the Pro's initial boot fails. With our new shortened boot time the BBG will be ready and waiting by the time the Pro displays its error screen. We then power the Pro off and power it back on. As long as the power cycle is less than 20 seconds (I eventually upped this to 30 as there appears to be plenty of power available), the BBG will ride the stored charge and keep serving the emulated disk image so that on that second power-on (and every power-on thereafter) the Pro will see the drive and boot from it.

eeew. Next time you are faced with such problem make your slow booting disk emulator control Reset signal of the main computer. Keep it in reset until emulator is ready.

A testament to the lack of success of this machine is that as a 50 year pdp-11 aficionado with a collection of machines from this period, I'd never heard of it until now! I knew about the Rainbow of course, and the pdp-8 based desk machines, but no clue this thing existed.

This is an enormous article, filled with everything - DEC history, ads from period IT mags, pictures of fabled hardware, reminiscing, hardware restoration.